You Know You Are Close When
by Cassend
Summary: - your friend decides you need pets. 120 of them. Jill freeing Carnies from a life of woe.


_ABC- You know I completely write on spur of the moment thoughts.**..**_

**You Know You Are Close When…**

You bear the wrath of stinking clown teeth and overly-sweaty faces covered in grease paint- to push and shove your way through dozens of heat-saturated bodies to scuttle to the shittiest fair booth you have ever seen in your life. You feel condensed and sick at all the people, way too many people at once when you've had the luxury of being alone. It didn't seem like such an issue until you were reintegrated into society, and crowds of hot, messy people triggered severe panic attacks that sent you to a hospital.

Months later, they tried to tell you how much progress you had made, but taking a step back and looking at your timeline from a different perspective, you don't see these words as true. Sure, you could walk through crowds without having a conniption, but it's almost impossible to see further progress than the anxiety.

But today you are going to do something- you've set your mind to do this, and you are not the subject of "professional medical help". Today, you scramble to a fair stand, despite the nerves bundled under your lungs, and slam a dollar on the rotten wood counter like you mean it.

And you mean it with the calmest expression you can muster when you talk to a terribly squat clown with a large red rubber nose.

"Can I have four, please?"

The smell of stale popcorn and a summer night drenched in fried foods and conspicuously built carnival rides lingered in your nose fresh with each breath. The clown rubbed his dripping forehead and pulled with a plastic-sounding bounce, four ping pong balls from a bucket under him.

You brushed the chocolate-colored hair from your face, tucked it behind your ear carefully, methodically.

Mission objective- "throw small, slightly clammy projectile ball into a random glass bowl behind the counter, and save a poor little goldfish from a carnie life."

A row of ten by twelve unevenly splayed in a square stood before you, tiny cups full of overheated water and sad little prisoners inside toxic shells. You used to have a goldfish named Soap, you know for a fact that such tiny containers would certainly kill the little things.

And suddenly your problems seem so miniscule to the problem of life and death without choice.

And simultaneously you are swallowing a shudder of complete revulsion with this game.

You sigh and pluck up the balls, and memories start playing through your head like timestamped therapy cases, each worse than the last. You have no idea if fish feel, but if you were a fish- you'd want to die if someone stuffed your scaly body into a cup. Now that you are on the tangent- you realize very quickly that you had scales for a time, and were quite the same as any of these poor souls.

Seeing one hundred twenty cups of dying prisoners instead of fish…

"Hey, you gonna shoot or what?"

You wanted to rip the red nose off his face and shove it in his mouth- but you simply glared at the clown wordlessly, and scooped up all four balls in your hand.

"If I land four, I get four?"

The clown snorts at you, a sucking, piglike oink and you feel your skin crawl and your lip curls into a bitter and irate snarl. You feel like an animal, but you feel more human now than you have in a while.

"Yeah sure." He grumbles, disbelieving.

3 years of medical induced sleep, torturous training, police academy, zombie survival…

You throw four pingpong balls like you've been doing that your entire life, and they land in four cups, four little cells.

You grin and the clown frowns and blubbers out his accusation.

"I'm a good shot." You offer. You didn't cheat. You put down a twenty dollar bill from the pocket of your jeans.

"You can't be serious!" says the clown.

"I am. "

Such a calm tone when your insides are racing.

The clown adds a trail of spittle to the multitude of smells infecting your nose. You don't even care and cross your arms. The sloppy teenager, unbuttoned flannel shirt and baggy jeans doesn't give a shit if you take all the fish, he's just sour that he has to bag them up- and so he takes the prisoners to transfer them to new cells.

You glare at the clown, set your lip, and eventually he pulls out the bucket and counts the balls out. 20 dollars for eighty shots. He probably wants to damn you right about now- but you start plucking up balls faster than he can spit the first expletive.

One fish, two fish, red fish, a lot of fish. With each solid thunk- each hit the teenager grumbled, the clown's greasy jaw hung lower to the ground. It was a cycle. You missed a few times, but your accuracy was uncanny, you ended up adding fifty nine to your collection.

"Want to give me all the fish now?" you sigh. You don't really care either way, you have a stupid amount of money in your pocket in wrinkled bills, and you have no time for games. You are freeing little prisoners from misery.

Originally, you intended to win a pet for Claire, something to come home to each day. She was in a decline- tired, mentally and physically failing after more and more attacks she was sent to mop up. The guilt weighed heavily on you that some of her tragedies probably were caused by your own drug-induced hands. Claire was going to get a present if you had to go to an overcrowded pigsty of a place and win her a scrawny little fish- and you were going to push your own issues aside for now, and make sure she's okay.

She's really what you have left of a social life after Kijuju.

You slam another twenty down, throw pingpong balls.

Score more fish.

And then there were none?

You watch the poor kid behind the counter bag your fish one by one while the clown was trying not to explode in a mess of grease and plum-shaped clown. You sigh gently, lower your hand onto the counter and put down another twenty for the clown so he wouldn't be fired for poor judgment.

"Sorry." You interject. "I trained with military. Go buy your boss off and let me take the crate to carry them in. "

You ignore him completely, it's another curse, you smell it on his yellow teeth, and grab the crate brimming over with 120 little fish in see through sloshy prisons. The pimple-faced kid inches towards you as if to stop you, but you see his change of heart as clearly as you see that neither of them are going to stop you. You're _military_, after all.

That clown might've shouted at you, but you didn't hear it, walked right out of the fair with the entire goldfish supply.

-Claire-

If you were Claire Redfield on this particular night, driving yourself, exhausted and half-drunk on caffeine and sheer exhaustion, you would have pulled up in your apartment parking lot and been none the wiser of what exactly was going on behind your apartment door. You would've checked your hair in the rear view mirror as you stretched to get your bearings, and you would have started laughing. Your hair was a tangled, greasy mess of reds, completely ridiculous looking, making you smile and associate the look with a wicked witch. Your typical ponytail looked like it had exploded and curled in on itself, something around two hours with the straightener would fix. Plane rides that lasted half a day could do that to a person. Of course you sat beside the guy who smelled a little like Cheetos, and the woman who slept the entire time and snored like a buzz saw.

You would've traced the waxy dark circles under your eyes and tried to gather up the motivation to move, and decided right then to "fuck it, I'm going to bed. Unpack tomorrow."

And you would have snagged your car keys and house keys and nothing else, and plodded up the steps to your room like you were just beaten down by the most vicious storm this side of the globe had ever seen. You would've unlocked your door.

And you would've lazily tramped into your apartment before it occurred to you that the lights were on and 322 eyes were staring in your direction. Fish everywhere.

"Surprise." Jill said to you, living and breathing fatigue, clothing hanging off her skin, smile genuine. The older woman greeted her with a gesture to look around, and look around she did, with or without invitation. There were literally goldfish swimming EVERYWHERE in a tank that looked like a professional landscaper had his or her way with it. Covered in blue decorative stones, sunken treasure themed tank with pirate skulls smiling out of the ground.

A fish tank.

An enormous fishtank running the entire perimeter of her house and casting blue ghosts on her floor. Holy shit this could not be within regulation! Your landlord was going to walk in any minute now and go into convulsions.

Jill approached, hugged, skinny arms over tired shoulders. Her ghost-blue eyes were sparkling, fish were swimming all around her.

"Jill…. What the fuck?" You murmured, as the school congregated towards the glass, expecting food. Pants bent this way and that, colorful displays.

"Hey, you will NEVER be home alone again."

A valid point to be made.

"How and how Many?"

"Lots. Multiple filters, fish food by the gallon, you are set. Welcome back to the world, Claire. "

You laugh and hug this older woman back, too tired to even question it.

"Yep. Gone for a few, and you fill my place with Fish. Real smooth."


End file.
